...by as many people are willing to listen to them. If you think that too many people are willing to listen to celebrities then criticise those people, not the celebrities.
If he had taken some time to automate this process - he could probably have achieved what he wanted to do in an hour, rather than a month.
Rather than have people email him to get the code, why not just allow them to download it themselves? Rather than require that people email him their cache directories at the end of it, why can't they be uploaded automatically?
This type of thing will become necessary once sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available, but until then - it is pretty hard to think of any applications for this that more conventional symmetric cryptography such as AES can't address.
I'm sorry - but if you want to convince people of something, then politely explain it to them, but there is no reason to inconvenience them in the process.
Any website which deliberate inconveniences its visitors as part of a "protest" does not deserve the visitors it receives, since it clearly thinks that these visitors are incapable of appreciating a political viewpoint unless they are absolutely forced to do-so.
Actually, that's exactly the point. Ideally lots of geek sites going offline will inconvenience folks who need information and rely on them day-to-day.
Great idea - you are going to persuade people by pissing them off, just like the RIAA is going to increase sales by suing their users.
Deliberately inconveniencing visitors to your website to make a political point is pure arrogance, and disrespects those that take the time to visit your website.
This online protest started April 5th... Why hasn't Slashdot joined this protest?
Slashdot's value is to bring this to people's attention, but it is perverse to suggest that they should effectively shut-down Slashdot to strengthen the point. If you want to go down that path, then I suspect there is a stronger argument for Slashdot to be shut-down in protest over world hunger. Ultimately, every website on the www would be shut-down over one issue or another, which would be rediculous.
I agree that we should put careful thought into how to present the argument, but I don't think your cooking analogy is the best way to do it. One could easily respond that if you were the first person to figure out the value of sifting "2 cups of flour with 1 tsp baking soda and 1/4 teaspoon of salt into a bowl", then they should have the rigt to profit from it. You can argue the point, but by that time your argument has been rendered impotent.
Pointing out specific implications, such as that if software patents were in widespread use in the 80s, the Internet would almost certainly not have emerged. Pointing out specific examples of the dangers. Pointing out the fact that there are numerous studies which point out the damaging effects of software patents, but none which demonstrate their value. These are the arguments we should be making.
Actually, it would be pretty tough to educate the average person on this stuff.
That is a self fulfilling prediction. If you assume that people are too stupid to understand these issues, then it is unlikely you will be able to explain it to them.
Don't give up before you have even started fighting, that is the only way we are guaranteed to fail. apathy and pessimism are our greatest enemies.
The last time we saw this kind of monopolistic control of information, it led to the dark ages.
The second dark age will not be caused by organized religion, but by the "content" industries and those politicians that deliberately or unwittingly serve their interests. Their power will come, not from the flawed dogma of authoritarian religion, but from the flawed dogma of intellectual property.
The people pushing this are not creators, in fact, if they really understood creativity they would understand why the whole concept of knowledge as property is so flawed. Walter Elias Disney understood, but those that control today's Disney Corp certainly does not (or just don't care).
The free software movement is a powerful demonstration of why these concepts are flawed, but could be rendered powerless by some of the more potent forms of intellectual property, such as patent law.
We must fight this on the political battlefield, if you haven't contacted your political representatives about this - now is the time.
Um, sorry, but if it is running the Linux kernel then it is Linux. It might be less flexible, but then a loss of flexibility is an almost inevitable price which must be paid for usability. Most people don't care about being able to retheme their desktop, or change their window manager, they just want something that works first time.
With iTMS, you have to sign up for their service, and agree to their contract, before getting access to the songs.
Ah, I see - so now we all think shrink-wrap contracts on websites are a good idea! Its getting harder and harder to keep up with whats hot and whats not among the/. crowd.
Having said that, I have noticed that where Apple is concerned, the two seem to get reversed:
DRM - bad, Apple DRM - Good! Shrinkwrap licences - bad, Apple shrinkwrap licences - Good! Closed source - bad, Apple closed source - Good!
To me the authors are vandals not revolutionaries, and may have ensured WMA becomes the standard.
So, the people who crack CSS or Adobe's e-book format receive fawning admiration from the/. crowd, yet someone that has the audacity to crack a media format produced by the makers of our favorite non-free operating system is a vandal.
Make up your minds - either those that circumvent DRM are heros or they aren't, but it shouldn't be decided on the basis of how much we like the company that came up with the DRM.
Cue management aplogists to explain why this is necessary or no big deal or how employees do worse, etc., etc., ad naseaum. Oh, and how we don't need unions and all that crap.
Cue socialist to start an argument against an opinion that nobody has even expressed yet.
The best thing about 0Install is that it essentially eliminates the whole process of installation - you just run the software, if it isn't cached locally - it will be transparently downloaded on-demand. AFAIK Microsoft doesn't do anything like this.
One of the great things about 0Install is that you don't need to be root to run software through it (with 0Install you don't really "install" software, you just run it - it is transparently installed if necessary).
You don't have to copy anything, you just have to run the binary - and any required components are downloaded transparently unless they are anready cached.
...is that most people don't really understand statistics, and tools like spreadsheets help people to forget this reality by blinding them with lots of authorative looking numbers.
The question is whether a tool can ever be a substitute for a good understanding of statistics and probability - or whether it will always be a case of monkeys playing with ever more sophisticated typewriters...?
The patent is in the server automatically setting up subdomains for users as they sign up. News.yahoo.com is not a good example. However, if Slashdot was setup so that typing in NanoGator.Slashdot.Org brought up my stats list, well that'd be more like what the patent covers.
IIRC Demon Internet in the UK has been doing exactly this for years (your computer would get a fixed IP address with hostname.demon.co.uk).
Neat in a way, but it sounds like a mess for doing real work.
It is. About a year ago I tried to use Groove to collaborate on a project with some other people that were geographically dispersed. Groove is able to hook into MS Word and allow several people to collaboraively edit a document.
To cut a long story short, it was completely and utterly unusable. After a few weeks we ditched Groove and went back to using email and IRC.
One thing to note for people who don't actually read the article, this is a car that is not only just a concept, but is a concept aimed at the type of women who would never open the hood anyway.
And reversing the analogy - this is why the whole free software argument about "would you buy a car if you couldn't open the hood?" is lost on most people. Most people have no desire to open the hood of their car, they get a mechanic to do that.
One of the main problems with most VoIP apps, whether on Linux or Windows, is that getting them to work through a NAT or Firewall can be an absolute nightmare, even for those for whom port-mapping is normally second nature.
This is the reason that Skype seems to be succeeding where others have failed, despite using a closed and proprietary protocol.
NAT2NAT (establishing a direct connection between two firewalled nodes) really isn't that hard to do (just get both peers to fire some UDP packets at each-other for a few seconds to fool the NATs), so why are there no free and open protocols for low-configuration VoIP? (and if I have missed one *PLEASE* let me know)
So it sounds like one of their difficulties is the fact that they were previously using M$ stuff and it is proving more difficult than they expected to disentangle themselves from it.
Sounds like another good reason to switch to Linux from where I am sitting:-)
Slashdot Mirror
...by as many people are willing to listen to them. If you think that too many people are willing to listen to celebrities then criticise those people, not the celebrities.
Rather than have people email him to get the code, why not just allow them to download it themselves? Rather than require that people email him their cache directories at the end of it, why can't they be uploaded automatically?
What a shame.
This type of thing will become necessary once sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available, but until then - it is pretty hard to think of any applications for this that more conventional symmetric cryptography such as AES can't address.
Any website which deliberate inconveniences its visitors as part of a "protest" does not deserve the visitors it receives, since it clearly thinks that these visitors are incapable of appreciating a political viewpoint unless they are absolutely forced to do-so.
Grow the fsck up.
Deliberately inconveniencing visitors to your website to make a political point is pure arrogance, and disrespects those that take the time to visit your website.
Pointing out specific implications, such as that if software patents were in widespread use in the 80s, the Internet would almost certainly not have emerged. Pointing out specific examples of the dangers. Pointing out the fact that there are numerous studies which point out the damaging effects of software patents, but none which demonstrate their value. These are the arguments we should be making.
Don't give up before you have even started fighting, that is the only way we are guaranteed to fail. apathy and pessimism are our greatest enemies.
The second dark age will not be caused by organized religion, but by the "content" industries and those politicians that deliberately or unwittingly serve their interests. Their power will come, not from the flawed dogma of authoritarian religion, but from the flawed dogma of intellectual property.
The people pushing this are not creators, in fact, if they really understood creativity they would understand why the whole concept of knowledge as property is so flawed. Walter Elias Disney understood, but those that control today's Disney Corp certainly does not (or just don't care).
The free software movement is a powerful demonstration of why these concepts are flawed, but could be rendered powerless by some of the more potent forms of intellectual property, such as patent law.
We must fight this on the political battlefield, if you haven't contacted your political representatives about this - now is the time.
Um, sorry, but if it is running the Linux kernel then it is Linux. It might be less flexible, but then a loss of flexibility is an almost inevitable price which must be paid for usability. Most people don't care about being able to retheme their desktop, or change their window manager, they just want something that works first time.
Having said that, I have noticed that where Apple is concerned, the two seem to get reversed:
DRM - bad, Apple DRM - Good!
Shrinkwrap licences - bad, Apple shrinkwrap licences - Good!
Closed source - bad, Apple closed source - Good!
Make up your minds - either those that circumvent DRM are heros or they aren't, but it shouldn't be decided on the basis of how much we like the company that came up with the DRM.
The best thing about 0Install is that it essentially eliminates the whole process of installation - you just run the software, if it isn't cached locally - it will be transparently downloaded on-demand. AFAIK Microsoft doesn't do anything like this.
One of the great things about 0Install is that you don't need to be root to run software through it (with 0Install you don't really "install" software, you just run it - it is transparently installed if necessary).
You don't have to copy anything, you just have to run the binary - and any required components are downloaded transparently unless they are anready cached.
The question is whether a tool can ever be a substitute for a good understanding of statistics and probability - or whether it will always be a case of monkeys playing with ever more sophisticated typewriters...?
most ISPs use transparent HTTP proxies these days, which should make it easy to block on the basis of a URL, not an IP address.
To cut a long story short, it was completely and utterly unusable. After a few weeks we ditched Groove and went back to using email and IRC.
...its easier to hire someone than to fire them - and the /. crowd won't admit that hiring him was a mistake.
This is the reason that Skype seems to be succeeding where others have failed, despite using a closed and proprietary protocol.
NAT2NAT (establishing a direct connection between two firewalled nodes) really isn't that hard to do (just get both peers to fire some UDP packets at each-other for a few seconds to fool the NATs), so why are there no free and open protocols for low-configuration VoIP? (and if I have missed one *PLEASE* let me know)
Sounds like another good reason to switch to Linux from where I am sitting :-)